Mukul
Gupta, a fourth-year doctoral student, along with Prof.
Alok Chaturvedi, management information systems; Shailendra
Mehta, director of Krannert Entrepreneurship Initiative
and co-director of Purdue E-Business Research Center
(PERC); and Prof. Bharat Bhargava of the Purdue Computer
Science Department, received a grant of $60,000 from
the Center for Education and Research in Information
Assurance and Security (CERIAS). The grant will fund
a project titled "Behavior-Based Artificial
Agents for Information Security."

According
to Gupta, the project will determine how the activities
of cyber terrorists/hackers can potentially affect an
economy. The researchers will work in the Synthetic Environments
for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS) lab to create artificial "agents" that
will emulate the behaviors of perpetrators who try to
break into into information systems.

"We
will see how successful the artificial economy will be
when the agents are introduced into its environment," Gupta
says.

Obtaining
the information about security solutions is easy; it
is provided by CERIAS. Creating the simulated hacker "agents," however,
will prove to be a little more difficult. "A lot
of data on hacker activities isn't available; companies
don't want to give out the information," Gupta says. "We
received some data through CERIAS on ways hackers have
broken into security systems. The data is summarized
from different sources; it doesn't give the names of
the companies or supply enough specific data that you
would know who a company is. We are also keeping up with
the news on information security breaches."

Gupta
says the researchers hope the results will benefit financial
institutions. "We want to come up with successful strategies
to minimize losses for these companies," he says.